The faces and places of Kirwin, Kansas

Kirwin, Kansas, established in 1869, was named after Colonel Kirwan, who oh-so-humbly insisted that they alter “Kirwan” to “Kirwin.” Though Colonel Kirwan did not live in the area, the settlement was named after him to honor his military status.

Kirwin, Kansas is the goose capital of Kansas. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Canada and Snow geese fill the skies, sunlight filtering and winking through their innumerable distant silhouettes, and flock to the wildlife refuge and local fields. The layers of their countless voices frantically honking over one another echo across the soft rolling hills of our land.

Kirwin, Kansas is a township of approximately 160 people. This number represents not only all the folks living in the surrounding area, but also those beyond the city limits who share the same zip code. The formal boundaries of the town cover less than one square mile of land.

Kirwin, Kansas has a single paved road that cuts straight through the middle of town and wraps around the library, creating the town square before continuing straight south out of town; the remainder of the roads are dirt, gravel, and shale. The closest stop light is 15 miles away.

Kirwin, Kansas has been my home for my entire life. From sixth grade to the end of high school, my brother Noah and I shared the paper route in town. While the paper had to be delivered by 6:30 a.m. on the weekdays, on the weekends it could be delivered by 7 a.m., allowing us 30 more treasured minutes of sleep. We would alternate weeks, spending that half hour in the morning in the car with mom, who had the pleasure of delivering the paper daily to the handful of folks around town that opted for the service.

As the first out of bed, she would wake either me or Noah before going outside to start the car and bring in the stack of papers. Half-asleep and often still wearing pajamas, I would join her at the dining room table to finish rolling and rubberbanding the individual newspapers. We stayed silent during this time, neither of us wanting to break the stillness of the early morning and both of us knowing that we would get the chance to talk in the car—about the good, the bad, the funny, the serious—and for me to learn about my town, my community, my family.

The first stop on the route is Gail and Henry’s house. To the unknowing passerby, their property might be mistaken for a junkyard, filled with years of abandoned projects, countless broken-down, decaying vehicles, and piles of collected odds and ends: old washers, tires, tools. These items swallow the old trailer home set deep into the cedar trees away from the street. Henry’s yard is the small-scale manifestation of his desire to collect. His goal is to own the entire town of Kirwin someday, and he’s come closer than anybody else—there are several dilapidated properties like this one scattered around town under his name.

Gail has her own business selling fishing licenses. In fact, she’s the only person you can buy a license from within a ten mile radius. As Kirwin is located on the edge of the Kirwin National Wildlife Refuge, Gail finds plenty of business throughout the spring and summer months.

Growing up, my dad would take me into her shop on the southwest corner of the square: the Hillbilly Inn. Upon walking through the squeaky metal screen door, I always found myself at eye level with the worn Wrangler jeans lounging across the ripped and duct-taped chairs. I considered those jeans just as much a fixture of the establishment as the stale cigarette smoke that hung onto the gruff laughter in the air. Whenever my dad spoke to Gail, I was left stuck beneath the counter, too short to see over the ledge, scanning the dollar pop bottles and cheap candy in the corner, always gravitating to the 78¢ Butterfingers. When accompanying my mom to the post office two doors down, I knew I was allowed to peer over the counter, dancing on my tip-toes in desperate attempts to secure a glimpse of what lay beyond the horizon of that granite ledge that separated my world from the adult one.

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Two of the most common faces outside the Hillbilly Inn on the square were the Pop-Can Man and George. (Small town living means that George’s ex-wife lived across the street from us and that his daughter was my sister’s childhood friend.) The Pop-Can Man was actually named Lloyd, but my brother and I could never remember his name because we were too distracted by the soda pop, a delicacy we were rarely afforded at home. Most days, you could see his hunched-over silhouette with its slow, uneven gait walking up and down the gravel streets of Kirwin, stooping occasionally to collect dusty change and old pop can tabs. Seeing as the town is less than one square mile, he could make his rounds rather easily in a day before returning home.

More often than not, when we ran into Lloyd while walking, he would offer us a can of pop. Despite the time he spent collecting the empty cans, Lloyd never hesitated to share the full ones that he had. The first time this happened, we were a little taken aback by his worn, rough hands extending a can of root beer our direction, but it soon became an exciting tradition to run up to Lloyd with pop can tabs in exchange for a full can. Our mom always took the time following the exchange to ask him how he was. The way adults averted their glances from the Pop-Can Man’s lone, strolling figure passed over my head as a child because all I could think about was how neat it was for this man, whose face warmed with a smile as he stooped to my eye-level, to be so lucky as to find spare change on the ground.

George was a short, squat man who lived in the triangular house on the edge of town—he was the fisherman of Kirwin. When he wasn’t at the Hillbilly Inn or Kirwin L & E Cafe, he was at the lake, or at Harold’s bait shop preparing to head to the lake, or at the fish cleaning station having just returned from the lake.

Despite the countless attempts my dad made, he could never catch a fish worth keeping—until one day, he called up ol’ Georgie and asked to go fishing with him. My dad’s happiness was contagious that day as we strung up a baker’s dozen of long, fat white bass to take a photo in front of the post office, directly beside the Kirwin L & E Cafe.

After his first success, my dad buckled down on his fishing attempts, setting out in the early mornings after heavy summer rain storms and before the drought dried the skies and hardened the supple Kansas soil. On these days, with the rising dawn casting a pinkish hue across the land, we’d scour the yard and sidewalks with buckets in our hands, drawing earthworms as thick as my pinkies out of the ground. After using the dampness of the grass to clean the slime and mud from our fingers, my dad stored the worms in a styrofoam box from Harold’s bait shop until it was time to return to the lake.

After Gail lost her leg, she closed the Hillbilly Inn, but continued to sell fishing licenses from her home. Now her business revolves around the deep freezers sitting on her porch, stocked with (slightly questionable, depending on who you are) Little Debbie snacks, which she encourages each customer to take.

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Queenie’s house was the next step on the paper route. Her yard had no grass—instead, it was bursting with other forms of life: tulips, lilies, cacti, hens and chicks, sweet potato vines, ivy, geraniums, myrtle, juniper. On the occasions that she welcomed me into her home, her small frail figure would appear ghostlike through the door, with her soft papery skin, milky blue eyes, and halo of curly white hair. She would open the door to reveal shelves that lined the top perimeter of her foyer and kitchen. Each shelf was filled with her darling teapots of various shapes, styles, and sizes, packed so tightly that the rounded belly of each pot rested against the one beside it.

The room beyond the kitchen was dominated by a quilting table stand, a table that held so much mystery and magic to me that I didn’t so much as dare to touch the fabric. The sturdy wooden frame of the stand extended nearly from one wall to the other and the expanse of fabric, with its myriad of patterns and colors dripping together to create the intricate piece of art, seemed to stretch on and on when I peered across the table. As a young girl I didn’t understand how “queen” could be in a name, but the enchantment of her plants and teapots and arts showed me how.

On the weekends, we also delivered the paper to Helen, whose daughter worked at the post office with my mom. Helen was (and still is) a regular at the church, and nearly every potluck Sunday without fail, she brings her chocolate sheet cake. But it isn’t just any old sheet cake. No, Helen will take the time to cut the cake into countless identical diamonds and arrange them into a flower shape on the serving platter. You can always recognize Helen’s sheet cake.

She passed on some of her baking skills to me and my brother, and we soon mastered her fudge recipe. On those days, she would send us home with full bellies and wide smiles as we clutched wee aluminum trays containing our chocolate goodies to our chests.

Our next stop, a large colonial home just down the block from Helen’s, belongs to the Scottmans, the couple who gave me my first job. Every Sunday at 1 o’clock when I was 13 years old, I would walk the four blocks across town to clean their house and garden. The Scottman’s home is considered to be one of the three “mansions” in Kirwin, meaning that it’s one of the three original houses built before 1880 that has survived in livable condition—a source of pride for the town. Mrs. Scottman taught me that behind every strong farming man was an even stronger farm wife who could balance a checkbook just as well as she could chop down bushes and oil an antique.

On those countless afternoons we spent together, Mrs. Scottman brought the house and everything within it alive with stories. Each carefully chosen piece of furniture came from somewhere, each Christmas decoration had a meaning, each antique was valuable to her for a different reason. She beamed with pride while talking about her daughters, sons-in-law, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, and she worked with fierce determination to care for her family, her home, and her farm.

Three blocks away lived Mrs. Scottman’s mother Ailene, for whom I began to vacuum shortly after beginning work for the Scottmans. I can now recite the history of her coffee table in the same manner as she did each time I rolled it out of the way to clean beneath it. As the tiny iron wheels screamed in resistant agony, Ailene would watch from her recliner, chuckling softly and shaking her head as she said, “Oh, that old squeaky thing… you know, Albert built that out of an old sewing machine base.” After discussing the lifespan of the coffee table, she would tell me about her dining table, built out of a similar sewing machine base, before moving on to stories about the little trinkets and toys her husband constructed. One of my favorites to hear about was his three piece chicken dinner: a small box that would fit within my palm and opened to reveal three single kernels of corn—the perfect dinner for a chicken.

The second to last stop on the route was a small single story house with a concrete porch, the awning bowed and sagging across the middle. The house is now a light burnt orange, but in my mind it will always be a faded yellow with the paint peeling and chipping off of the old boards. Before my grandma lived there, it was our home. The big move for us came when we transferred the whole six blocks across town into the second of the three “mansions” of Kirwin.

Shortly before we moved, my cat Pumpkin went missing, sending seven-year-old me into a panicked frenzy (and, therefore, my dad too, in frantic attempts to find the cat). Sure enough, after two weeks of seeing neither hide nor hair of my dear, sweet Pumpkin, my dad discovered her in the lap of the neighbor’s wife during a visit at their house. After resolutely denying the woman’s claims that it was her cat, my dad marched the block home victoriously with my cat tucked in his arms.

Our little yellow house was always overflowing with a flurry of activity: my sister, brother, and I swinging upside-down from the porch railings while throwing little popper-pepper plants on the cement porch to hear them pop; flying down the uneven sidewalk on our hand-me-down bikes; digging through the dirt while working in the garden all summer long, our eager fingers snapping the plump, red cherry tomatoes from the vines and rubbing them on our shirts before popping them into our mouths. Every scorching Kansas summer of my childhood can be captured in the warmth of those cherry tomatoes as they slipped past my lips, the taut skin bursting open to divulge the sweet and tangy meat.

When my grandma moved in, the atmosphere of the little yellow house became softer, quieter. You’d always find a puzzle in progress on the dining room table and cookies in the jar on top of the microwave. Within the first few days of moving in, she placed little yellow smiley face stickers randomly throughout her kitchen: one on the light switch, one per random cabinet door here and there, one on the outlet plate near the sink. On days where she had absolutely nothing else to keep me occupied with, she’d send me into the kitchen to find and count all the smiley faces, sending me back to recount when I came back with the wrong number. Looking back, I realize the number changed every time not because I didn’t know how to count, but because she needed to keep me busy.

On warm days, Grandma would sit beside me on the shiny worn edges of the concrete steps of the front porch to play Railroad. She would spell the word railroad aloud, and after she was done, I would have to spell a word that started with the last letter of the previously spelled word. Without fail, the order of the first four words would always be railroad, dog, giraffe, elephant. When we got bored of spelling or began to respell the same words, Grandma would dig out a tennis ball. After showing me how to throw it on the roof of the garage and catch it as it bounced off, she would disappear inside to relax while I kept myself busy with the tennis ball outside.

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The final stop on the paper route was on the edge of town at the base of Water Tower Hill, aptly named for the water tower at the top of the hill. This road leads out of town toward the cemetery and the lake: the perfect road to walk during the summer. Nearly every day in the summer, my mom and grandma would leash up the dog and walk their three-mile loop out to the dam and back home; more often than not, my brother, sister, and I would accompany them. The smooth shale roads would coat the bottoms of our shoes in a fine layer of white dust; we were taught as children to close our eyes and turn our backs to the center of the road when the occasional vehicle passed by to prevent the billowing clouds of dust from hurting our eyes. This wasn’t always necessary, however, because there was a 50/50 chance that the vehicle would stop in the middle of the road (it’s not as if any other cars were coming) with the window rolled down to chat.

Before the edge of the dam by the lake, the road splits off to the right towards the town’s small cemetery. There’s a legend around town that the land on which Kirwin is built is sacred and protects us from the tornadoes that roll through during storm season. Whether or not this is true, Kirwin has never once been struck by a tornado; even when one touches down and is heading straight for town, before it reaches city limits, it relocates itself more often than not to the cemetery. This explains the shattered, scattered, and missing gravestones. Despite how outlandish this legend seems, many of the folks in town take it as fact.

While most people probably don’t spend time in their town’s cemetery, my dad would often take me and my siblings there. What did we do in a cemetery in the middle of nowhere during the heat of the afternoon? Snake hunting. My dad would load us up in his old, red, single-bench-seat Dodge with the windows rolled down and drive us out to the cemetery, never breaking ten miles per hour. The travel time was filled with him singing the name song, taking time to do all of our names: “Noah, Noah, Ba-Boah, Fee Fi Fa-Foah, Noo-ah.” Snake hunting for us was the same as fishing: catch-and-release.

Now the rule with snake hunting is that if a snake is spotted on the road before or after the cemetery, it’s still fair game, which often means pulling off to the side and jumping out of the truck to catch a bull snake coming out of the ditch.

The next best thing to finding a snake in the road is finding a turtle. There’s an unspoken rule in town that when you find a turtle or snake in the road, you need to stop and help them cross. For snakes, this normally means just shooing them off in the direction they’re headed; for turtles, this means picking them up and crossing the road for them—unless it’s a snapping turtle. Depending on the size of those fellas, you let them take their sweet time making it across.

Every year in the fall, it’s a tradition for the families with kids to go out and find a box turtle for the town turtle race at the end of October. These races are an integral part of Kirwin's only event: Old Settler’s Day, which takes place during the last weekend of October. The event celebrates the settlement of Kirwin in 1869, yet does not discuss the history of the area beforehand or address the colonialist implications of the event. The morning kicks off with a parade around the square (think re-enactment groups, families on mules, and local kiddos leading goats with homemade signs advertising their mowing business) and is followed by a variety of contests: the slow bicycle race, an egg toss, the watermelon seed spit, a hula-hooping contest, a turtle race, horse shoes. While it was easy to get lost in the festivities of Old Settler’s Day as a child—and still is now—I find I have mixed emotions about the event due to its unacknowledged colonialist past.

For those who have never experienced the riveting excitement of a turtle race, imagine three concentric chalk circles, the largest circle no larger than five feet in diameter. The turtles are placed under a cardboard box in the middle circle. On Go, a volunteer lifts the cardboard box and the turtles are off! The first one to escape the outer ring of the circles wins first place; second and third are the next closest. Afterwards, the turtles are taken back out to the refuge and released safely, much to the heartbreak of the little ones who had doted on their temporary pet.

At the end of the day, the town draws in the biggest crowd of the year with a demolition derby. The derby begins around 7 o’clock in the evening, but everybody and their dog starts filing in as early as one in the afternoon with their pick-up trucks to claim a spot to watch the show that evening. Because the derby takes place in a fenced-in arena, folks will back their trucks up against the fence and put couches and lawn chairs in the beds of the truck in order to watch. While this may seem a bit excessive, it makes more sense when knowing that one year, a set of bleachers collapsed from a combination of age, wear, and all the weight sitting on them that night.

The competitors in the derby spend months modifying old metal-framed junk cars to meet the requirements of the derby: no windows, reinforced supports, no other seats beside the driver. Most of these vehicles are already crinkled and crunched up like tin cans from past derbies. The frames are spray painted with various colors, numbers, sayings, and names.

When the gun fires at the start of each round, the roar of the banged-up cars and open exhaust pipes deafens any other sound within a half-mile radius—flames shoot out of the hoods of some vehicles as gas pedals are slammed to the floor and the cars fly backward in reverse into one another. The first collision sends the crowd into roars of excitement as folks immediately choose favorites and start placing casual bets amongst one another. A driver is considered to be out of the round when the yardstick duct-taped along the top of the driver’s side window frame is snapped—whether this be by accident or on purpose.

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Our paper route stopped at the base of the Water Tower Hill. After pulling around the final driveway, we’d roll down the window and greet Mrs. Ranson on the porch; in addition to handing her the newspaper, we’d pass over our empty egg cartons in exchange for a full 18-count carton collected from her chickens—which explains why I grew up thinking all egg cartons were filled with various shades and sizes of brown speckled eggs. Imagine my surprise when, years later, I bought an all-white uniform set of eggs from the store (which, by the way, is 15 miles away). This small act of kindness reflects the mindset of our small community: we love and look out for our own, whether it be running across the alleyway to Dolores’ house for that last half cup of milk or stopping in between paper stops to scoop the snow off the sidewalks of those who can’t. Everybody knows everybody, for better and for worse. While this means that the curtains close as soon as the sun goes down to prevent the neighbors from peeking in your blinds (true story), this also means that as soon as you run into trouble, you have an entire community of people to rely on.

As time keeps moving on, the past continues to fade and blur together. The Hillbilly Inn closed, George was diagnosed with stage four cancer, and there have been increasingly sparse glimpses of Lloyd the Pop-Can Man. Queenie passed away last year, and Helen no longer has the energy to bake her cake as often as she used to, making it that much sweeter when it’s on display at potluck Sundays. While helping Mrs. Scottman clean out her mother’s house after her death, I hugged her sweet, strong body to mine and boxed up the photo albums, trinkets, and matching china—a beautiful set of grape-glass which Mrs. Scottman gifted to me upon my high school graduation. The last time I saw my grandma alive on the morning she passed, I brought the paper inside to her, delivering it right to her hand in the recliner. She asked me to bring her a glass of water, and I readily complied, filling the same styrofoam cup she reused as long as she could and kept by the side of the sink. Now, the newspaper route in town is cancelled and even Water Tower Hill speaks to the past and the loss of my dad.

But memories and stories are the way that we keep each other alive and teach the next generation the lessons of those passed. This might mean having a good laugh over Jonesey who waits until the sun goes down to park his truck across the street from his house (yes, he owns that property too) with his headlights illuminating his front yard and the windows rolled down to blare Hank Williams Junior’s music while he mows his lawn with a beer in hand; or giving Crazy Kathy a ride home from the cafe when it’s too cold to walk despite the warnings and stories. Small town living means that Lurch might tell you his real name, but then says he prefers the nickname Lurch because he’s lost count of the times he’s been told that he resembles the butler from the Addam’s family; or discovering that the neighbors who have wolves as pets (questionable, yet we have no cops in town so what can you do) actually have a meth lab in their garage after the wife runs over the husband with her car during a tweaked-out dispute.

Growing up, I thought everybody grew up knowing their neighbors and receiving support from the members of their community; then again, I also thought that the county’s single stoplight 15 miles away in “town” is what made Phillipsburg (population 2,500) a city. I spent each grocery trip with my nose pressed against the van window staring at the changing colors of the green, yellow, and red lights and loving the thrill of visiting the “city.” I find much less excitement in the countless stop lights here in Colorado Springs. Having gained perspective on my community through distance, I’ve developed a much deeper sense of appreciation for the people that molded my childhood. It turns out there’s a whole lotta truth behind the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child.” And, quite frankly, I wouldn’t trade my village for the world.

*Several names have been changed for privacy.